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Sleeping Next Door to a Winery: A Night Spent Beside the Vines
Winery touring has a structural weakness. The person who should be the star of the tasting usually ends up being the driver. You have come all the way to wine country, and yet whoever holds the wheel cannot touch a glass. The most beautiful solution to this problem is simple: stay where the wine is made.
Once you are staying the night, wine hours stretch into the evening. The bottle you bought that afternoon gets opened somewhere with a view of the vines. Drunk in the air of the place it came from, the same bottle tastes nothing like it would in a city restaurant. The land’s wind and temperature become part of the flavor.
Japanese wine is at a fascinating moment, with each region’s character coming into sharp focus. Koshu whites, Nagano Merlot, Hokkaido’s cool-climate styles. A trip that sleeps in wine country is also a trip that tastes those differences land and all. There is only one shopping tip: choose your evening bottle while it is still daytime. Wineries close early.
Sleeping in the Middle of the Vines: EAST WINDS VILLAGE Naka-Izu
A winery-run glamping in Naka-Izu looking out over Mount Fuji and 10 hectares of vineyards. Because the lodging is the winery’s own, nothing sits closer together than the vines, the cellar, and the table. Waking to find a vineyard outside your window is, for a wine lover, something of a dream made real.
Koshu Wine Beef and Saunas: ARMIN BASE Minami-Alps
A private sauna glamping of just 4 units standing by a river in Minami-Alps City, Yamanashi. Every unit comes with its own sauna and cold plunge, and you can enjoy saunas of different types, wood-fired stoves and electric ones, tea-leaf loyly, and a BBQ of Koshu wine beef. As a base for traveling Yamanashi, Japan’s wine prefecture, it lets you get thoroughly reset in the sauna before opening the evening’s bottle.
Domes Built by a Winery: Tokachi Wakka no Mori
A glamping in Tokachi, Hokkaido, produced by Aizawa Winery. Its all-weather domes are built to extreme cold-climate specifications for year-round stays, and there are private saunas and a dog run as well. The cool northern land is now one of the frontiers of Japanese wine. Drinking the local wine in a lodging set up by the people who make it is the very essence of staying in wine country.
Even the Tipsiness Is Part of the Itinerary
A trip that sleeps in wine country spares the drinkers any worry about driving. That alone changes the look on their faces from the very first tasting pour. The autumn harvest is when wineries are at their liveliest. Before the grapes begin to color, why not book your bed in wine country now?